1. Field
One embodiment of the invention relates to a contents transfer method of transferring contents to a portable contents playback unit, and more particularly a transfer method of transferring music contents and additional information simultaneously, an information processing apparatus and information recording/playback system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A portable music playback unit (audio player) capable of storing digital music data in a physical memory (memory card) or a hard disc, and playing music has become popular in recent years.
Music data can be obtained from a CD (Compact Disc)/DVD standard optical disc or a public broadcast supplied through a space wave (terrestrial wave) or a satellite, or by downloading from a specific server (distribution site).
It is disclosed by for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication (KOKAI) No. 2002-123273 discloses an information processing apparatus, which downloads music data, artist name, tune title, album title, release date and related image data from a distribution site (server) through the Internet, and transfers the image data together with these music data to an audio player.
The above document disclosing the audio player (information processing apparatus) does not include a detailed description on a method of managing and handling data and files to be updated for a user to download new data related to already downloaded music data, or to update the downloaded data.
In many cases, an audio player has a small storage capacity compared with a contents management apparatus such as a personal computer. Thus, a function of updating downloaded data and handling unnecessary data is indispensable to satisfy the user.
However, though data can be updated according to a size and date/time, the procedure of uploading and downloading data is too complex for most users.